“SPOTLIGHT”: Digging for truth

The devastating docudrama “Spotlight” is about the quest for truth when nobody seems to want to hear it.

The film describes how in the early 2000s four investigative reporters for The Boston Globe uncovered the Roman Catholic Church’s routine reassignment of pedophile priests to new parishes where they could abuse even more children.

It’s a true-life horror story guaranteed to infuriate audiences, yet writer/director Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent,” “The Visitor”) steers clear of cheap shots, hyperbole and sensationalism. “Spotlight” is a work of rigorous discipline; given the film’s focus on religion, perhaps “asceticism” is a better description.

Think of it as a journalistic procedural.

The film stars Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo and Brian D’arcy James as the members of the Globe‘s investigative Spotlight team. They deliver understated, believable, utterly non-glamorous performances without a trace of showboating or pumped-up emoting. (They act the way the Royals play baseball — with their egos on hold.)

Despite the restraint with which it has been conceived and produced, “Spotlight” is hugely effective. The conventional dramatic bells and whistles are not only not missed, they’d be detrimental to the film’s success, getting in the way of a real story that demands to be told.

“Spotlight” begins with the arrival at the Globe of a new executive editor. Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) comes to Boston from Miami. He is, as one local wag describes him, “an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball.” In other words, about as much an outsider as you can be in Beantown.

But it’s precisely because he hails from elsewhere that Baron gloms onto a small item in the back of the paper about a pedophile priest and asks Spotlight editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Keaton) if it’s story worth looking into.

As played by Schreiber, Baron is the kind of stiff, laughless guy uncomfortable with smalltalk. Or, for that matter, with the suggestion of Cardinal Bernard Law (Len Cariou) that together the newspaper and the church can work for the betterment of all Bostonians.

Unlike “All the President’s Men,” the reporters digging into the case don’t fear for their own safety. They’re not about to be snatched by men in black.

But they must balance their own faith (most are Catholic) with their obligation to get at the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be. They’ve got to be bulldogs when it comes to gathering facts, they’ve got to defy the Boston power structure without seeming to be in open rebellion.

The project will require them to call up the patience to wade through reams of material (at the time the internet was a mere shadow of its current form, meaning research had to be done the old-fashioned way, page by early page) and to balance sympathy and professional distance while interviewing the traumatized victims of sexual abuse.

Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo

There’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to put the story together or that it will force a change.

“The Church thinks in centuries,” a reporter is cautioned. “Does your paper have the power to take that on?”

Document by document, interview by interview, the Spotlight team assembles its case. Sounds boring. But it’s riveting.

In large part it’s because of a cast of unknowns playing abuse victims. “How do you say no to God?” one survivor says of his relationship with a predatory priest.

These terrific actors embody the devastating human fallout of abuse, while letting us know how it happened. (One of the strengths of “Spotlight” is that it never attempts to depict the actual abuse in flashbacks. The victims’ testimony is enough.)

The four leads are terrific without reaching. I was particularly taken with Ruffalo’s Mike Rezendes, the sort of pushy reporter who in his determination to get to the heart of things risks pissing off his interview subjects. McAdams’ Sacha Pfeiffer is herself a good Catholic girl who comes to dread each new revelation. And D’arcy James is the suburban father appalled to discover that a house on the next block is a group home for “recovering” pedophile priests.

They are matched by a superb supporting cast: John Slattery, Stanley Tucci (as an attorney who for years has been tilting at the diocesan windmill), Jamey Sheridan, Billy Crudup. One unseen and uncredited performer (sounds like the great Richard Jenkins to me) is merely a voice on the telephone — that of a shrink who for years treated pedophile priests and is now the subject of a Church-sponsored smear campaign.

Everyone involved gives the impression that the story they’re telling is more important than their personal screen time.

Moving silently and efficiently behind it all is McCarthy (and co-writer Josh Singer), who has made an intimate film about a devastating public and personal crisis.